equipment profile - Finning Canada

The family Dargis: Leona, Jeanette, Jean, wife Joanne,Lynne, Suzanne and SarahDargis and his neighbours donate their timeand resources to the Foodgrains BankCalgarian Mark Roen has finallyachieved his desire for detailThis year, there was a new machine at the Bonnyvilleareaarm of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank harvest.Jean Dargis’s new Cat 590R was the largest of sixcombines at work in the annual event. In fact, Finning’s590R, a class-9, is the largest combine in the world.Canadian Foodgrains Bank is a Winnipeg-basedorganization, providing food and development assistanceto people in need since 1983. It’s one of the largestprivate food aid providers in the world and maintainsa low overhead. Its website says that donations madeby Canadians have helped the Foodgrains Bank providemore than 944,000 tonnes of food aid.“But people don’t want a handout, they just wanta hand up,” says Ed Persely, who sits on the board ofthe Northeast Growing Project, the Bonnyville-area arm of theFoodgrains Bank. Persely, who brought the program to his area,explains that recipients participate in work-for-food projects,including agriculture improvement, such as irrigation initiatives.In the past, programs have run in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, India andelsewhere. Food aid products are suited to local tastes, paid forby the sale of the grains harvested by Canadian farmers, suchas Jean Dargis.Dargis and his country neighbours, Maurice Campeau,Murray Pikowicz, Emil Leguerrier, and Gerard Dargis, went towork on a golden September day to harvest 120 acres of canolafor the Foodgrains Bank. The seed, labour, maintenance andfuel were all donated.The annual Foodgrains harvest has become a social outing aswell as a charity event, complete with music, food and a farmingdemo by the local historical society. Neighbours from St. Paul,St. Vincent and Bonnyville came, including school kids and farmfamilies. Among them were Jean’s wife and five daughters.The Foodgrains harvest was a chance for Dargis to show offhis brand-new Cat 590R, though truth be told, it was almosttoo big for the job. “I bought it for capacity,” Dargis says. “Athome, we were running three combines, and wanted to replacethem with two.” He says his new iron shines when conditionsare tough. “It has two rotor separators, separating barley fromstraw more vigorously,” Dargis says.Dargis bought his 590R from Edmonton and deals withFinning rep Mike Schnitzler, though so far he’s only called onSchnitzler for technical questions. Dargis has had no complaints.“It’s user-friendly,” he says. “It can strait-cut most everything.Cat has a new table – the G535 – it’s a rigid strait-cut tablewith a split auger, split reel and dual knife drive.” For Dargis’busy farm, it’s turned out to be just what he needed.It also turns out that Cat runs in the family. In the crowd thatSeptember day was Dargis’s sister Paulette Fersovitch. She andher husband have a Kenworth T800 with a 550 horsepower CatC15 engine in it. “My husband does the maintenance faithfully,greasing it weekly and changing the oil every 300 hours,” shesays. “We got it in 2005 and there’s 340,000 kilometres on it.We haven’t had a problem yet.”www.finning.ca Winter 2006 • TRACKS & TREADS 35